INDEP online Talk with Christoph Sorg – Planning and Social Reproduction: Communal Care, Revaluing Reproductive Work, and Gender Relations

This event will take place in English.

In order to participate, please register here.

This presentation builds bridges between the emerging literature on democratic planning and feminist political economy, and by extension work on racial capitalism, in order to address the class reductionism and economism that characterize parts of the planning debate. Christoph Sorg begins by briefly reviewing how models of democratic planning treat social reproduction and gender relations (if and when they do), and then turns to recent work on the socialization of care. On this basis, he identifies three interfaces for productive exchange between these literatures. First, at the intersection of the literature on planning and the socialization of care lies the commune as a new social institution that links households to societal planning processes, facilitates the socialization of care and transcends the division between waged and unwaged work. Second, the systemic revaluation of reproductive work in the non‑household economy challenges capitalism’s institutional privileging of industrial over service (including care) work and related sectors. Third, he contends that advocates of planning must theorize how different configurations of the socialization of markets and social reproduction can secure material independence and equal access to social life for marginalized groups in order to strengthen their social bargaining power in broader anti-domination struggles.

Christoph Sorg is a social scientist at Humboldt University Berlin with a focus on planning in capitalism and beyond it. He recently co-edited the book “Creative Construction” (Bristol University Press) and a special issue of Competition&Change “Rethinking Economic Planning” (both with Jan Groos). Within the planning literature he publishes broadly on questions of social reproduction, social transformation, the politics of investment, North-South inequality and ecological planning. His two most recent texts on planning, social reproduction and gender relations are still in peer review, but available on request.